PARALLEL PROGRAM CITY TERRITORY. ART MADRID'25

VIDEO CYCLE: CARTOGRAPHIES OF PERCEPTION

In its 20th edition, Art Madrid dedicates its Parallel Program to the exploration of the relationship between man, architecture, city and landscape. Under the title Cartographies of Perception, this section, curated by PROYECTOR's Moving Image platform, presents a selection of international video art works that address these interactions from a contemporary and critical perspective. PROYECTOR, a reference platform for the moving image, invites us to participate in an experience in which time, space and perception converge on the screen.

The collection presented this year proposes a reflection on the relationship between man and his environment, on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, and on the tensions between the natural and the constructed. As quoted by the critic John Berger: "Art is a way of seeing, a constant discovery". The selected works are not only vehicles of plastic beauty, but also invitations to discover new ways of observing, questioning, and possessing a representation of the world..

In this conceptual journey, The Divine Way by Ilaria Di Carlo evokes the labyrinthine descent inspired by the Divine Comedy, where the stairs mutate into metaphors of psychological and architectural transit.

Imitación a la vida by Juan Carlos Bracho, on the other hand, uses a monumental mirror to explore the landscape as a reflection and the image as a bottomless pit, questioning our perception of our surroundings.

In the arid desert of the dry lake El Mirage, Lukas Marxt inscribes a spiral with a vehicle in his work Circular Inscription, paying homage to Land Art while questioning the human imprint on the landscape.

Magda Gebhardt's performance Atlas carries the symbolic weight of the world as she constructs and destroys landscapes that defy notions of time and space, exposing the artifice inherent in the image.

The introspective journey of Yuchi Hsiao in Somewhere I Belong to Be uses toy cars moving across her face to symbolize a personal transition, while lololol's Wafer Bearer Deep Rain explores the relationship between technology and everyday life in Taiwan, the epicenter of global semiconductor production.

Finally, Breaking News: The Flooding of the Louvre by Tezi Gabunia offers a disturbing vision of the flooded museum, anticipating the impact of climate change on cultural heritage.

Each work in this selection offers poetic and philosophical views of life and invites collectors to own a piece of this conceptual journey. By acquiring these works, they become custodians of stories and visions that reflect and challenge our understanding of the contemporary world.

ABOUT THE ARTWORKS AND ARTISTS

The Divine Way. Ilaria Di Carlo. 15:00. 2018. 2K color.

The Divine Way. 15:00. 2018. 2K color

The Divine Way, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, accompanies the protagonist on a labyrinthine descent through an endless series of staircases. Each step reveals an architectural and psychological mutation, transforming the landscape into a visual and emotional trap. Winner of dozens of international awards, this work is a monumental journey into the unknown.

Ilaria Di Carlo. Courtesy of the artist.

llaria Di Carlo

Ilaria Di Carlo (Lazio, 1981) is a visual artist whose practice combines film, scenography, installation and performing arts. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and with a master's degree in scenography from Central Saint Martin's College in London, she also studied digital film production in Berlin. His work explores travel, identity and their relationship to landscape and architecture, using a visual aesthetic inspired by scenography. His short films have been awarded and exhibited internationally, including his outstanding work The Divine Way. Based in Berlin, she continues to work as a set designer, director and actress in experimental theater projects.

Breaking News: The Flooding of the Louvre. Tezi Gabunia. 3:02. 2018-20. 2K color.

Breaking News: The Flooding of the Louvre. 3:02. 2018-20. 2K color

The flooding of the Louvre Museum speaks about news culture and our fluctuating perception of disasters as seen through the media. The scale of the disaster is often difficult to assess from news coverage. In the work “Breaking News”, the flood slowly enters the room of the Louvre, allowing the viewer to gradually witness the destruction of the interior. It brings the viewer shockingly close to what has not happened but easily could have; the viewer sees the before-and-after effect in a highly visualized manner, which is as convincing and threatening as it is fake. The artwork presents a scoop—a situation where information, as a spectacle, surpasses the terrifying nature of catastrophe and where the real event is abolished. Is information a new type of reality? Is it possible to truly cover real events? These issues arise during the encounter between two situations: the destruction of art artifacts and the spectacular nature of this process.

Tezi Gabunia. Foto de Giorgi Nakashidze. Courtesy of the artist.

Tezi Gabunia

Tezi Gabunia (Tbilisi, 1987) is an artist and architect who graduated from Tbilisi University and is known for her systematic approach to exploring cultural manipulation through various media. Winner of the 2016 Tsinandali Visual Arts Award for her project Put your Head into Gallery, her work has been exhibited internationally in cities such as Batumi, Vienna, Krakow, and New York. Highlights include participation in the Story as a Woven Carpet collective in Berlin and presentation in the Focus section of the 2020 Armory Show.

Circular inscription. Lukas Marxt. 6:50. 2016. 2K color.

Circular Inscription. 6:50. 2016. 2K color

In the desert landscape of dry lake El Mirage, a car circles incessantly, leaving indelible marks on the surface. The work is both an homage to 1960s Land Art and a reflection on human intervention in the landscape. The marks on the ground evoke works such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty, translating the monumentality of the land into the space of video art.

Lukas Marxt. Courtesy of the artist.

Lukas Marxt

Lukas Marxt (Austria, 1983) is an artist and filmmaker who explores the interaction between human and geological existence as well as the impact of humans on nature. Trained in geography and environmental sciences, he completed his audiovisual studies in Linz and holds a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Cologne. His work, which has been exhibited in museums such as the Torrance Art Museum and the Biennale of Painting in Belgium, combines visual art and film. His films have been screened at festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno and Gijón, where he was awarded the Principality of Asturias Prize. Since 2017, he has been researching the ecological dynamics of the Salton Sea in California.

Imitation of Life. Juan Carlos Bracho. 20:46 2017 HD color.

Imitation of Life. Juan Carlos Bracho. 20:46 2017 HD color.

A large-format mirror and the act of erasing its surface become a performative meditation on image, landscape, and perception. Bracho confronts the viewer with the illusory nature of images, questioning whether we are critical thinkers or merely hypnotized consumers. This single-shot narrative reveals a world where the image transforms into a plastic and mutable entity.

Juan Carlos Bracho. Courtesy of the artist.

Juan Carlos Bracho

Juan Carlos Bracho (Cádiz, 1970) explores space, drawing as a cartographic tool, and the circularity of contemporary creativity. His work is based on small, repetitive gestures that generate powerful sensory images, transforming apparent monotony into evocative scenographies. Through systematic actions and minimal graphic elements, he reflects on the consolidation of images, landscape as symbolic transformation, and aesthetic experience as catharsis. His practice encompasses video, photography, installation, performance, sculpture, and drawing, with projects that continuously interact, creating a narrative of parallel mirrors and infinite escapes.

Atlas. Magda Gebhardt. 6:12. 2012. HD B/N.

Atlas. 6:12. 2012. HD B/N

Like the mythological Titan, Gebhardt bears the weight of the world in a continuous process of creating and destroying landscapes. The performance redefines notions of time and space, exposes the artifice of both landscape and image, and positions the viewer as the central axis from which perception is structured.

Magda Gebhardt. Courtesy of the artist.

Magda Gebhardt

Magda Gebhardt (Porto Alegre, 1981). She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Lyon. She is a painter and professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure D'architecture in Paris-Malaquais, where she currently lives and works.

Wafer Bearer Deep Rain.lololol (Xia Lin y Sheryl Cheung). 12:00. 2022. 4K color.

Wafer Bearer Deep Rain. 12:00. 2022. 4K color

Exploring the interaction between technology and everyday life, this work analyzes the natural and industrial phenomena of Taiwan as the epicenter of global semiconductor production. Through a multi-narrative video, it establishes a poetic and critical relationship between technical objects and human beings.

lololol (Xia Lin y Sheryl Cheung). Courtesy of the artists.

lololol (Xia Lin y Sheryl Cheung)

Founded in 2013 by Xia Lin and Sheryl Cheung, lolololol is a Taiwanese art collective that explores how emotions and body politics are shaped by technological cultures, martial arts, and ontological materialism. Their approach combines Asian philosophy and mind-body practices as alternative ways of investigating the interaction between humans and technology. In 2020 they founded Future Tao, an artistic platform for collective collaborations. Their projects have been presented at prestigious festivals and museums such as Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (UK), Taipei Arts Festival, Times Museum (China) and Liquid Architecture (Australia).

Somewhere I belong to be.Yuchi Hsiao. 3:31. 2017.

Somewhere I belong to be. 3:31. 2017

This work explores emotional release through a slow, symbolic gesture. A toy car runs across the artist's face as his hands reach out of the frame, reflecting the act of letting go of what is holding him back. The tension between retention and transformation is materialised in the subtle tugging of the car on his hair. The action becomes a visual metaphor for letting go of the past and embarking on a new path.

Yuchi Hsiao. Courtesy of the artist.

Yuchi Hsiao

Yuchi Hsiao (Kaohsiung, 1986) is an artist specialising in video art and installation, with a Master's degree in New Media Art from the National Taipei University of the Arts. Her work explores the relationship between the individual and her environment, focusing on the unusual events of everyday life and projecting intimate emotions from personal spaces such as her bedroom. Hsiao combines textiles and second-hand clothing with video works to expand reflections on the mind and everyday life. His work has been exhibited internationally in France, Bulgaria, Macau and at the Nakanojo Biennale in Japan.

The Video Cycle Cartographies of Perception will be shown in the Espacio Tectónica (stand D2) during the week of the fair. The cycle, curated by PROYECTOR's Moving Image platform, deals with migration and the relationship between peripheries and urban centres, examining the city as a complex organism, at once a labyrinth and a Tower of Babel. Through video, the artists reflect on the role of the individual in the transformation of architectural space and the dynamics of feedback in an interconnected world, inviting viewers to expand their perception of the spaces they inhabit. In this dialogue between image and territory, Cartographies of Perception maps other fragmented realities and opens up a space for questioning and critical sensitivity, where the gaze becomes the first step towards a new understanding of our surroundings.

The work of Iyán Castaño (Oviedo, 1996) is situated within a genealogy of contemporary art that interrogates the tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, placing artistic practice on a threshold where nature, time, and perception converge. His research begins with an apparently minor geomorphological phenomenon—the traces left in the sand by the action of the tides—and transforms it into a poetic device for sensitive observation of the landscape. The temporal restriction imposed by low tide functions not only as a technical constraint but also as a conceptual structure that organizes the creative process and aligns it with an ethic of radical attention and presence.

Far from approaching the landscape as a mere backdrop or stage, Castaño recognizes in the maritime environment a generative system that precedes all human intervention. The sea, wind, and light produce autonomous records that he translates pictorially, shifting authorship toward a practice of listening and mediation.

The territory—initially asturian and progressively extended to other geographical contexts—functions as a material archive and situated memory. Each work becomes an unrepeatable index of a specific place and moment, revealing the fragility of natural cycles without resorting to explicit rhetoric of denunciation. In this way, Iyán Castaño’s painting operates as an active pause, a gesture of suspension that allows us to experience the world’s constant transformation from a sensitive and reflective proximity.

Open waters. 14-04-24. Expanded graphic on canvas. 2024. Detail.

In your practice, you work under the time constraint imposed by low tide. How does this temporal limit shape your creative process?

Low tide profoundly conditions my working method, but it does not function merely as a time limit; rather, it is the axis around which the entire project is structured. There is a prior phase in which I study meteorological conditions and the possible climatic variations of a specific day; based on this, I know whether I will be able to work and with which materials.

Once on the beach, during low tide, I have a very limited window—sometimes barely two hours or even less—in which I must move through the space searching for existing traces. If I find one, I intervene in it; if not, I must move on to another beach. After the intervention, I have to remove it quickly before the sea returns and erases every trace. In a way, these works transform the ripples of sand—those forms that are essentially ephemeral—into something permanent.

Where the sea is born. 15-09-25. Expanded graphic on canvas. 40 x 60 cm. Rodiles Beach, Asturias. 2025.

How does the meteorological and maritime environment—the unpredictability of the sea, wind, light, and tide—become a co-author of your pieces?

I do not consider the environment a co-author in the traditional sense, but rather the true author of the traces I work with. I am interested in understanding nature as a great creator: through tides, waves, wind, and light, the sand generates forms that are in constant regeneration. In order to create my works, the sea must first have created its own.

From there, using acrylics, oils, waxes, or sprays, I attempt to translate into the work my sensations and emotions in front of the sea at that specific moment. Whether it is winter or summer, cloudy or sunny, a small cove or an expansive beach, all of these context conditions result and become imprinted in the work.

Sand Ripples. 07-04-21. Expanded graphic on canvas. 189 x 140 cm. Niembro Estuary. Asturias. 2021.

Your work is closely tied to the Asturian territory—beaches, coastal forests, the cove of La Cóndia. What role do place, topography, local identity, and geographic memory play in your practice?

Place is everything in my project. Asturias was the point of departure and the territory where my gaze was formed. I have been working along this line for seven years, and over time I have come to understand that each trace is inseparable from the specific site and the exact day on which it is produced.

From there, I felt the need to expand the map and begin working in other territories. So far, I have developed works in Senegal, Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands, Indonesia, and elsewhere—and in each case, the result is completely different. The sea that bathes those coasts, the arrangement of the rocks, the morphology of the beach, or even the animals that inhabit it generate unique traces, impossible to reproduce elsewhere. This specificity of territory—its topography and geographic memory—is inscribed in each work in a singular, inseparable, and unrepeatable way.

Mangata. 05-11-25. Expanded graphic on canvas. 190 x 130 cm. Sorraos Beach. Llanes. 2025.

To what extent are climate change, rising sea levels, altered tidal cycles, or coastal erosion present—or potentially present—as an underlying reflection in your work?

My work does not originate from an ecological intention or a direct form of protest. If there is a reflection on the environment, it emerges indirectly, by bringing people closer to the landscape, inviting them to observe attentively and to develop a more empathetic relationship with the environment they inhabit. Beaches are in constant transformation, but I do not seek to fix the landscape; rather, I attempt to convey the experience of being in front of it. In this sense, each work is like a small sea that one can take home.

Tree of Life. 19-02-25. Expanded graphic on canvas. 50 x 70 cm. El Puntal Beach. Asturias. 2025.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

In my work there is very little planning in terms of the final result, but there is a very precise preliminary planning. Before going to the beach, I monitor the time of low tide, wave height, wind, and weather conditions; based on this, I decide which beach to go to. Even so, when I arrive, I still do not know what work I am going to make. It is there that I determine which material to use, which color to apply, and where the intervention will take place. Many times, the environment simply does not allow work on that day, and chance becomes an essential element of these works. Error, in turn, becomes a new possibility if one learns how to work with it.